A lot of utilities charge more for power during 'peak demand hours' too - most of the time you don't have a lot of choice (utilities are basically legalized monopolies), which is why they are able to fix prices, and screw customers, because what else are you going to do?
Generating your own electricity tends to be impractical, noisy (if you use a generator - and some areas won't allow you to run them), expensive (solar power systems will pay for themselves, but you have to come up with the cash up front - and the payback is currently out around 10 years.
About all you can do to prove that the utility is trying to screw you is to shut off all of your breakers (or pull all your fuses) and see if the meter recognizes that all loads have been disconnected from it. The only thing that you usually have to have on is your refrigerator, but if you wanted to do an experiment, you could get a cooler and keep stuff on ice for a few weeks - use no (or as little power) as possible and if they still try to hand you a large bill, you demand that they come to your house so you can break your foot off in their ***.
When meters fail, they usually read low. The most likely culprit is something inside your house like a refrigerator wearing out. You can stand outside most houses and count the seconds it takes for the disk to go around. Then turn off major items for a minuet and see how much the impact is. Big users are air conditioning, then refrigerator. We had a refrigerator that was using 50% of the energy of the air conditioner, and that was way too high.
Clean the coils of your air conditioner. Replace the air filter. When you replace the filter, take a look at the evaporator coils in the furnace. Air conditioning techs measure the pressure difference across the coil.
Clean the coils on your refrigerator. What about your hot water heater if it is electric. Don't forget the lights. If you leave lights on throughout the house it adds up. Switch to florescent.
Many power companies only read the meter twice a year. The rest of the time they estimate it. This may have been the catch up month.
Did you leave an iron turned on for a few days ? They eat electricity for a hobby, this happened to me once. I now have an iron that switches off after a few hours and the red light starts flashing on it to let you know it still on. Its a great feature on an iron when you have no brains like me
I keep a regular check on my electricity meter and I can almost forecast the next reading. However when I took my last readings I almost collapsed as it could run to a small fortune.
Does anyone know whether outside influences can affect meter readings?
I am in process in trying to switch suppliers but have had to put that on hold
